The European refugee crisis of 2015 has long since abated, but European nativist and populist parties continue to attempt to stoke the popular backlash against immigrants to fuel their rise. Italy’s Matteo Salvini, the golden boy of Europe’s anti-immigrant populists, even rode the issue into government in 2018, before marginalizing himself with a bid to force early elections in 2019 and, more recently, misplaying the politics of the COVID-19 crisis. Nevertheless, Europe’s other far-right populists, like France’s Marine Le Pen, continue to hammer on anti-immigrant sentiment, hoping it will remain a potent issue in upcoming elections.
In the midst of a global pandemic, it is not clear it will have the same electoral impact as it did in 2015, when a wave of refugees and asylum-seekers arrived in Europe from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. Still, the threat is enough to keep centrist governments toeing a tough line on immigration at home, even as they work with countries of origin and transit to restrict migration, thereby driving asylum applications back to pre-2015 levels.
Migrants rest on a Mediterranea Saving Humans NGO boat, as they sail off Italy's southernmost island of Lampedusa, just outside Italian territorial waters, Thursday, July 4, 2019 (AP photo by Olmo Calvo).
Anti-immigrant sentiment was central to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s winning 2016 campaign, and he subsequently reshaped U.S. security policy around stopping illegal immigration. His administration even returned asylum-seekers to the Central American countries they transited on the way to the U.S. border, despite the lack of security that is driving people to flee those countries. The issue did not have the same resonance in the 2020 presidential campaign, though, in part because it was difficult for any issue besides the coronavirus pandemic to break through and capture attention. President Joe Biden has already rescinded Trump’s controversial entry ban on citizens of Muslim-majority countries, halted construction of Trump’s wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and promised a more comprehensive approach to addressing the root causes of the migration crisis. Whether or not that will be any more effective remains to be seen.
With political debates over migration often dominated by short-term strategies, many of the persistent drivers, including persecution, conflict and war, go unaddressed. The United Nations Refugee Agency’s most recent figures counted 82.4 million forcibly displaced people around the world at the end of 2020, up from 79.5 million in 2019. Among them were 26.4 million refugees and 48 million internally displaced people. While global leaders might seek to curb migration by spurring economic growth, they cannot ignore the role played by conflict and persecution, which often make asylum-seekers unable to return to their home countries. There has also been little global focus on future drivers of migration, including climate change.
Meanwhile, efforts to craft some kind of global consensus on migration are falling victim to the same forces that are demanding quick solutions to a complex issue. Following Washington’s lead, several countries backed out of the U.N. Global Compact on Migration, which was ratified in early 2019, despite it being only a nonbinding framework to help address some of the key issues surrounding the global migration boom—including how to institute policies that ensure migrants are treated humanely. More recently, the trend among wealthy countries to force refugees and asylum-seekers to await the processing of their claims in third countries is threatening the very principles of international humanitarian law that underpin the refugee and asylum system.
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